The Weirdest Chatbot on the Internet Is a Medieval Monk

Buried deep in Character.ai is a chatbot that has absolutely no right to be as entertaining as it is. "Brother Aldric" is a medieval Benedictine monk who will discuss anything — quantum physics, Taylor Swift, cryptocurrency — but only through the lens of 12th-century monasticism.

Ask him about Bitcoin and he will explain it as "a ledger most wondrous, maintained not by any abbey but by a congregation of machines." Ask about social media and he will lament "the vanity of displaying one's meal for all the village to witness."

The creator, a history student in Edinburgh, built Brother Aldric as a joke. It now has over 200,000 conversations. There is something genuinely delightful about watching an AI commit so fully to a bit that it accidentally becomes profound.